Our holdings include hundreds of glass and film negatives/transparencies that we've scanned ourselves; in addition, many other photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs) in the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) They are adjusted, restored and reworked by your webmaster in accordance with his aesthetic sensibilities before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here. All of these images (including "derivative works") are protected by copyright laws of the United States and other jurisdictions and may not be sold, reproduced or otherwise used for commercial purposes without permission.

I can't guarantee this is Father's Day, but going by the date imprinted on this Kodachrome slide mount it's certainly plausible. This is on the deck seen previously, with our dog Missie and my mother engrossed in the paper under the grape arbor. Today I'm six months older than my father is here, which in some undefinable way doesn't seem possible. View full size.

Continuing my vacation theme, we return to the same beach ten years earlier. I'm wearing the St. Christopher medal that was then a permanent accouterment, but what really kept me from drowning then and forever afterwards was making sure that my extremities were firmly in contact with the bottom at all times. This was when the Russian River region was the vacation destination for denizens of the San Francisco Bay Area and was jammed with sun and fun frolickers during the summer months. About ten years later, freeways made Lake Tahoe more easily accessible and Guerneville and environs went into a serious and sad decline that lasted until the 1980s. View full size.

February 2, 1939. "Builds own Jalopy. Thirty dollars was all it cost Robert Preston, 16-year-old high school senior, to build this midget automobile. Weighing approximately 250 pounds, the 'jalopy' is powered with a washing machine motor of ¾ horsepower and has a maximum speed of 20 miles an hour. His license tags for this year will cost 32 cents." Harris & Ewing glass negative. View full size.

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo archive featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1960s. (Available as fine-art prints from the Shorpy Archive.) The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.